RUTHFULLY YOURS

Her name is Tatyana Goldman Alexander, she is Jewish and she is serving as one of seven women, among a total of 39 Supreme Court judges, on the Supreme Court bench of the majority Moslem country, Azerbaijan.http://newsblaze.com/world/eurasia/azerbaijans-supreme-court-judge-a-woman-in-a-moslem-country_87639/

This is my second meeting with Madam Tatyana, an extremely friendly and hospitable lady, open to a heart-to-heart chat. I especially requested an interview with the Lady Judge because it is rare to see a woman serving in such a high position when Moslem countries are known for their oppression of women. And a Jewish woman on top of it? That is the ultimate. There are no Jews living in Moslem countries. But Azerbaijan, though a majority Moslem country, is a total different story, a story I wanted to tell.

Madam Tatyana’s roots are in the Ukraine. She comes from a long line of professionals, lawyers, doctors, architects.

Her mother’s grandfather was a lawyer. He was one of only five Jewish students in the entire Russian empire who were accepted to study at St. Pietersburg University. However, he could not get a job unless he changed his religion, gave up being a Jew.

Her father’s family, name Gusman, she thinks were originally expelled from Spain, moved to Baku from Ukraine in the early years of 20th century; her mother’s family moved to Baku from Ukraine in the 19th century. Why? Because both families had many children and suffered from intolerance.

During Stalin’s rule, life in Baku was difficult for everyone, especially for Jews. Stalin wanted to build a country for Jews north of Siberia where living conditions were intolerable. For instance, her grandmother’s sister who lived in the Koluma Region, Azerbaijan, was sent to that futuristic planned Jew region where she was held and was brain washed for 17 years. When Stalin died, she returned to Baku with a mission to build Communism in Azerbaijan.
Hamsa

During the Communism period, life for Jews in Baku was difficult.

In Baku, the Gusman family is well known. Her father, an architect built many buildings in Baku still standing today.

Madam Tatyana’s formal studies took place in Baku. She received elite education, earned a law degree and practiced law. “In Soviet times many Jews became lawyers” she states.
About the Azerbaijan Judicial System

The “moderating hubs” for France’s social media are generally located in French-speaking countries with cheap labor, in North Africa and Madagascar. In France, rumors abound that Facebook’s moderators are located in French-speaking Muslim countries such as Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. Facebook never confirms or denies outsourcing its “moderation” work to companies employing cheap Muslim labor in North Africa.

Notably, Muslim hate-speakers continue to proliferate on Facebook, while anti-Islamists face harassment and the loss of their accounts.

These Facebook users, like dozens of others, seem to be the victims of Islamist “packs”. Once the opinions and analyses of these Facebook users are noticed, they are denounced to Facebook as “racists” or “Islamophobes” and their accounts are deleted.

Fatiha Boudjalat, the co-founder of the secularist movement Viv(r)e la République, is a prominent figure of anti-Islamism in France. She is interviewed regularly on television and radio, and her op-eds are regularly published in Le Figaro. Recently, on Facebook, Boudjalat criticized strongly an Islamist government employee, Sonia Nour, for calling the Tunisian Islamist murderer of two women in Marseille, a “martyr”. A few weeks after that, Boudjalat’s Facebook account was deleted.

She is not alone in having been targeted by Islamists on Facebook. Leila Ourzik, an artist who lives in Grigny, a predominantly Muslim suburb not far from Paris, is a Muslim who eats and drinks openly during Ramadan and resists wearing the Islamic veil. Because of her un-Islamic behavior, she is openly insulted and threatened daily, as well as on social networks. On Facebook, Ourzik became a target. Islamists harassed her with insults and threats, posted her picture on pornography websites, and finally succeeded in obtaining the deletion of her account on Facebook. Suddenly, without warning, her Facebook account was shut. “Not once, many times” she says to Gatestone. Why? “I do not know, they never tell you. But one day, it is over, everything is deleted”.

Olivier Aron, a dentist and former politician, was taken off Facebook for weeks. Aron is active in debates about Islam and Islamism. He is also not shy. On Facebook, he contradicts Islamists. Islamists, however, do not seem interested in debating. They seem interested in censoring. According to Aron, many of them complained to Facebook. “I suppose they accused me of being a racist and an Islamophobe” Aron said. “Intimidation is everyplace. A man I do not even know discovered my telephone number and all my contact details and sent them to his friends”. Consequences were not long in coming. Aron’s assistant at the dental office received a frightening phone call: “Tell doctor Aron that soon ‘Kelkal’ will hit him”. Kelkal, an Algerian Islamist terrorist, was a member of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) and responsible for the wave of attacks in France during the summer of 1995. Although Kelkal was killed by the police 20 years ago, for many radicalized Muslims, he remains the prototype of “modern” jihadist.

Last spring, Michel Renard, a history teacher in Saint Chamond, was also deleted from Facebook. “Without any warning, without any possibility of talking to someone, suddenly all my writings were gone,” he told Gatestone. Renard had posted online extremely detailed analyses of Islamism. “But,” he said, “Islamists are extremely active on Facebook. They insult you; they threaten you”. Even though Renard refused to be “friended” on Facebook by his pupils, “their parents complained to the director of the school… Intimidation is everywhere, in real life and on the Net”.

These Facebook users, like dozens of others, seem to be the victims of Islamist “packs”. Once the opinions and analyses of these Facebook users are noticed, they are denounced to Facebook as “racists” or “Islamophobes” and their accounts are deleted.

In France, Facebook deletes thousands of accounts every year. It would be interesting to know how many among them were deleted because their owners questioned Islamism, but no one knows: Facebook never communicates other than by bland boilerplate declarations that clearly seem intended to avoid explaining anything.

What we do know is that “Facebook has 4,500 ‘content moderators’ and that it recently announced plans to hire another 3,000”, according to The Guardian. 7,500 moderators for more than two billion Facebook users? That is ridiculous.

The Guardian continues: “There are moderating hubs around the world, but Facebook refuses to disclose their exact number or locations”. The question should be, in fact: Does Facebook outsource content moderation to subcontractors, and if so, to which?

In France, three companies appear to be competing as subcontractors for moderating online content: Netino, Concileo and Atchik Services. The “moderating hubs” of these companies are generally located in French-speaking countries with cheap labor, in North Africa and Madagascar. In France, rumors abound that Facebook’s moderators are located in French-speaking Muslim countries such as Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. Facebook never confirms or denies outsourcing its “moderation” work to companies employing cheap Muslim labor in North Africa.

Notably, Muslim hate-speakers continue to proliferate on Facebook, while anti-Islamists face harassment and the loss of their accounts.

It is a symptom of the dominant denial in the French media that it keeps repeating — despite massive evidence to the contrary — that “Islamism is not at war with Western culture.” As a consequence, freedom of speech in France is now “moderated” by Muslims in Muslim countries.

The Barcelona Process, promoted by the EU, has helped to facilitate a greater presence of Islam and Muslim immigrants in Western Europe — thereby also increasing the Islamic terror threat there. That result was perfectly foreseeable.

When the number of people who believe in Islamic Jihad doctrines rises, the likelihood of experiencing jihadist attacks increases as well.

It is unlikely, though, that European political leaders will point to this connection. Doing so would be an indirect admission that Europe’s leaders have actively increased the Islamic terror threat against European citizens. This is the brutal truth they do not want exposed.

The murders on the pedestrian street of La Rambla in Barcelona on August 17, 2017 were not the first Islamic terrorist attack in Spain. On March 11, 2004, 192 people were killed, and around two thousand injured, in the Madrid train bombings.

In hindsight, that attack marked a new phase in the modern Islamic Jihad against Europe. After the Madrid bombings, London was hit with deadly bombings on July 7, 2005. In recent years, the frequency of jihadist attacks on European soil has increased dramatically.

It is probably not a coincidence that Spain was an early target of Islamic terror. The Iberian Peninsula, present-day Portugal and Spain, was for centuries under Islamic rule. Militant Muslims have repeatedly made it clear that for them, reconquering Spain is a priority.

The murders on the pedestrian street of La Rambla in Barcelona on August 17, 2017 were not the first Islamic terrorist attack in Spain. (Image source: JT Curses/Wikimedia Commons)

Ironically, some people in Barcelona seem to view tourists who pay for short-term visits as a greater threat than Muslim immigrants who come to stay permanently. One can hear similar reactions among some radical left-wing activists, for instance, in Greece.

Mass tourism can potentially cause problems such as overcrowding and local pollution. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that only a few days before the terror attack in Barcelona, some locals were complaining about an invasion of tourists. One radical left-wing group, Arran, published footage of tourist bikes in the city having their tires punctured in acts of deliberate sabotage. Of course, the problem might be even greater if there were too few tourists.

Meanwhile, a real invasion of Spain and Europe is taking place. For years, huge numbers of illegal immigrants from the Islamic world and Africa have been entering, especially through Greece or Italy. Spain, too, has seen a spike in the number of illegal immigrants. The Spanish-controlled enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa are under increasing pressure as points of departure for migrants.

https://wp.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/

WANTED FOR GENOCIDE

[Notes by Tom Gross]

I attach five unrelated pieces below.

In the first, the New York Post reports that police were forced to release a Sudanese Arab UN diplomat, Hassan Salih, for groping a woman’s breasts at 2:25 am in a New York bar because he enjoys diplomatic immunity.

(Alcohol was outlawed in Sudan under Muslim Sharia law in 1983, and the penalty for drinking alcohol there is 40 lashes.)

In May Hassan Salih was elected (by fellow Arab nations and third world countries) as vice-chair of the UN committee that oversees the work of 4,500 human rights NGOs, including groups that defend the rights of women.

I have previously drawn attention to the election of Sudan as Vice-Chair of this UN committee overseeing human rights groups, on the grounds that the Sudanese regime is one of the worst persecutors of human rights activists in the world, and Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir is wanted for genocide at the International Criminal Court.

This is the second time this year a Sudanese diplomat at the UN has claimed diplomatic immunity. Mohammad Abdalla Ali was arrested in January for grinding his crotch on a 38-year-old woman aboard an uptown 4 subway train in the middle of the afternoon.

Last week leaders of the Senate intelligence committee, senators Richard Burr and Mark Warner, gave a press conference in which they announced they are eager to speak with Christopher Steele, the former British MI6 officer believed to have compiled the controversial dossier of allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia. Steele reportedly spoke with special counselor Robert Mueller about the dossier, but the committee has yet to hear from the man who laid the foundations for the theory that Trump or his campaign team colluded with Russian officials to fix the 2016 presidential election for him.

One reporter, however, claims that the Senate intelligence committee has verified “some of the Steele dossier.” Ken Dilanian of NBC News told MSNBC Thursday morning that “Burr said they had been able to corroborate some aspects of it.”

But in the 40-minute-long press conference, neither Burr nor Warner suggested anything of the sort. Rather, Burr said “the committee cannot really decide the credibility of the dossier without understanding things like who paid for it, who are your sources and subsources?” Dilanian explained that “two sources told NBC News the committee has corroborated parts of the dossier.”

Dilanian did not explain to viewers what Burr was clearly hinting at—namely, that the Steele dossier is the paid product of a private information company called Fusion GPS, which has become notorious for inventing sleazy and often fact-free attacks on democratic whistleblowers and political figures and feeding them to journalists. Dilanian himself is no stranger to Fusion GPS.
Who Is Fusion GPS?

In summer 2016, Fusion GPS distributed the dossier under Steele’s name to a number of major news organizations. All refrained from publishing a document they couldn’t verify. It was finally published by BuzzFeed in January after CNN reported U.S. intelligence agencies had briefed outgoing president Barack Obama and his incoming successor Donald Trump on the existence of the dossier.

It was Fusion GPS that also spearheaded a campaign to dismantle the Magnitsky Act, the 2012 legislation that imposes sanctions on Russian officials and figures associated with the regime of Vladimir Putin who are known to have played a role in the 2009 death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. Fusion GPS’ effort, according to William Browder, the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act and head of the Magnitsky Global Justice Campaign, included a smear campaign against him and his late friend and lawyer.

In his explosive July 27 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Browder, the 53-year-old CEO and founder of Hermitage Capital Management, alleged Fusion GPS may have violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by spreading Russian state propaganda. Washington DC journalists, Browder added, were in on the game—getting stories from the company that first tried to torque American law to benefit Putin and his cronies then spread the salacious Steele dossier.

“I suspect that a number of journalists,” Browder testified, “and one in particular here in Washington was operating so far outside the bounds of normal journalistic integrity that there must have been some incentive for them to be doing it coming from Fusion GPS.”

The journalist Browder alluded to is NBC News’ intelligence and national security reporter: Ken Dilanian. In extensive interviews, Browder alleged to me that a number of journalists, including Dilanian, were beholden to Fusion GPS and its principals, including former Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson, for supplying them with stories in the past. Reporters, Browder argued, were therefore reluctant to look too deeply into Fusion GPS’s smear campaign against him and Magnitsky. Multiple attempts to reach Dilanian for comment went unanswered.

To back up his assertion about NBC and Dilanian, Browder showed me documents that chronicled Dilanian’s reporting on the Magnitsky Act—reporting that Browder believes moved in tandem with Fusion GPS’s campaign to discredit both himself and Magnitsky in the hope of repealing the law and lifting sanctions against Russia.
Russia’s Target: Corrupting the American Press

What these records and other accompanying documents also suggest is that Russia’s attempt to “hack” the 2016 election was hardly just about the election, and that a main target and beneficiary of that effort—which is ongoing—is the American press.

In an email hacked from the account of a U.S. foreign service officer, Dilanian asked Sen. Ben Cardin’s office if the senior Democratic member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wanted to comment on the story about Magnitsky that he was reporting. “There is no evidence he was beaten in prison, as Browder has alleged,” Dilanian declares:

and it’s clear from police and court records that he wasn’t detained because he blew the whistle on an alleged fraud scheme. He was detained over tax evasion by Browder’s companies. In fact, there are credible allegations in court documents that Browder and his associates are suspects in the fraud—and that Browder concocted the whistleblower story to cover that up.

We plan to publish something about this next week, and I wanted to give Sen. Cardin a chance to comment on it. He is not a large part of the story, and if these allegations are true, he is one of many smart and influential people who were misled, obviously.

Another email, hacked from the same cache, written by a Democratic staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, dismisses Dilanian’s thesis: “There is overwhelming evidence that Sergei Magnitsky was beaten in prison”—after which the staffer makes his case clearly:

Photographs of his beaten body were available to us, which show physical evidence of him having been beaten. … We reviewed the detention center protocol, which reports that Magnitsky was beaten with rubber batons by guards on the evening of November 16, 2009—the night he died. … Magnitsky’s Death Certificate refers to a cerebral cranial injury. … The forensic postmortem conducted by Russian state experts refers to injuries on Magnitsky’s body consistent with the use of rubber batons.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan is right when he complains that Turkey is threatened by terrorists who kill innocent citizens and want to bring down his government. But when Turkish authorities tar innocent journalists for abetting terrorism, they confirm to the world that Turkey’s President has turned his country into an authoritarian state.

On Tuesday a Turkish court falsely convicted Wall Street Journal reporter Ayla Albayrak of propagandizing on behalf of an outlawed Kurdish terror group. The evidence for Ms. Albayrak’s “crime”: An Aug. 19, 2015, Wall Street Journal news story about the bitter fighting in a remote, Kurdish-majority, Turkish city called Silopi that borders Syria and Iraq. Turkish forces fought there with the outlawed PKK, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party.

Ms. Albayrak quoted some members of the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Group, which Turkish authorities say is affiliated with the PKK. But she also quoted government officials, local residents and the mayor—and explicitly identified the PKK as designated by both Ankara and Washington as a terrorist outfit. Nowhere in her balanced dispatch did she praise either the PKK or the youth group, and everything she did to report this story as fairly and objectively as possible was within the bounds of good journalism and Turkish law.

The indictment noted that some Turkish-language websites lifted parts of her story and an accompanying video for their own purposes. But they used selective quotes, and none are affiliated with the Journal and none were authorized by either the Journal or Ms. Albayrak.

There is no evidence Mr. Erdogan initiated these charges against our reporter. Yet they are surely a consequence of the repressive atmosphere he has created in Turkey, especially after a failed military coup in 2016. The Turkish president has taken advantage of the state of emergency to solidify his hold on power by cracking down on anyone his government doesn’t like.

This repression is now extending to the foreign media, and even beyond Turkey’s borders. In February Deniz Yücel, a reporter for Germany’s Die Welt, was arrested in Istanbul and remains detained without charges. Amnesty International notes Turkey now has more journalists in jail than any other country.

Ms. Albayrak, a dual Turkish and Finnish national, is now in New York. But that doesn’t mean the conviction isn’t damaging. The Erdogan government has already abused Interpol, the international police network, by issuing “red notices” to have journalists and critics arrested in other countries until they can be extradited. In this way a system meant to target criminals is turned on good journalists like Ms. Albayrak and makes it dangerous for them to travel and do their jobs.

When any local Turkish official can create an international incident by freelancing a political prosecution, it underscores Turkey’s descent under Mr. Erdogan and creates unnecessary rifts with other countries. Ms. Albayrak plans to appeal, which gives Ankara a path out of this injustice. But it requires a Turkish judiciary willing to assert itself by standing up for the rule of law and tossing this shameful and dishonest prosecution.